Toadstool Poetics: Alliteration in The Faerie Queene

Abstract

If, in The Shepheardes Calender, Colin Clout’s evocation of the “formall rowmes” of the honeycomb suggests Spenser’s pursuit of a rational, classical poetics, then what are we to make of their displacement by “the grieslie Todestoole growne”? This article proposes that Spenser’s usurping “Todestoole”—as a twin image to Harvey’s “Hobgoblin runne away with the Garland from Apollo”—fixes in view The Faerie Queene’s deviations from honeycomb order, and specifically its proliferous alliteration. It shows how sixteenth-century censure of alliteration was grounded in the tenets of classical rhetoric; it then explores the evidence for an incipient awareness and, eventually, qualified acceptance of the role played by alliteration in vernacular meter. Having in this way demonstrated that alliteration, in the period’s own literary-critical discourse, was more vulgar “Todestoole” than Apolline honeycomb, this article offers a reading of alliteration in The Faerie Queene as generative of Spenser’s “toadstool poetics.” Reducible neither to narrative nor metric functions, Spenser’s alliterative patterns—entangled, irregular, and prone to excess—habitually overrun forms of honeycomb containment.